MISHANDLING OF THE YEAR
Also for: Amstrad CPC, Arcade, Atari ST, Commodore 64, DOS, Game Gear,
Genesis, J2ME, MSX, Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo Switch, SEGA Master System, SEGA
Saturn, TurboGrafx-16, ZX Spectrum
Ray Harryhausen was the king of the old stop-motion special effects in movies between the 1950:s and 70:s. He created many unforgettable movie monster
scenes by moving puppets in minor increments between frames. In the finished
film, the monsters moved around gracefully, but also with a certain
jerkiness to them, and it created the unmistakeable Harryhausen-thumbprint on
adventure films like Jason and the Argonauts and
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
I was about to title this review "Ray Harryhausen's Big Race", because the
jerky monster movement came to mind when I watched the cars hop around the
road in this abominable game. But then I double-checked the old master's work,
and found that they performed so much better than Out Run on the Amiga.
It would have been sacrilegious to compare Harryhausen's work to the piss-poor conversion (developed by Probe Software and published by US Gold) of this classic
SEGA arcade racer.
We now know that the Amiga was capable of so much more, but it was often held
back by the technical limitations of lesser, competing platforms. Judging by the videos present on YouTube, the Amiga version is practically identical to the Atari ST version. Apart from the menus, the graphics look primitive, and the engine sounds like a growling stomach. Only the music sounds decent, for what good that'll do.
But such things hardly matter. Only the controls, response and sense of speed do. If you can't get framerate right, there's
no point in making a racing game at all. In this conversion of Out Run, you hardly have time to react to the visuals because there's no fluidity to the movement. Everything seems to hop around the screen haphazardly. Releasing a racer in this sorry, choppy
state should be cause for a revoked licence - to create more games.
In this racing atrocity you drive a Ferrari Testarossa through a landscape
inspired by locations from all over Europe. The game is divided into five
stages, and you have to reach the checkpoint at the end of every stage before
time runs out, otherwise it's game over. By your side sits a blonde woman. If you believe she's your girlfriend I hate to tell you she might be flirting with other people (see the cover art up top).
The idea behind Out Run is pretty cool. Just ahead of each checkpoint the road
splits into two directions. Depending on your choice of left or right you can
reach the goal line by going a few different paths through the game. I got the
"a", "c" and "e" ending, because I'm such an "ace"-driver. And to my big
disappointment they all ended with the same "funny" scene, where my car fell
apart after I got out of it. In the arcade original, I believe you got a
different ending depending on what route you took.
All you need to know is that Out Run is virtually unplayable, yet very
easy to beat because of a generous time limit. The unplayable aspect is due to
the aforementioned framerate, in combination with the camera perspective. You
control the car through third-person, and the camera is positioned so low
behind the car, you can hardly see anything in front of you. Even some of the view of the
road is blocked, making it hard to react to approaching curves in time.
In fact, only 20-25% of the screen is used to display the road, most of the time.
The rest contains the one-colored skybox and horizon.
The low framerate causes your car to jerk back and forth across the screen,
and the same goes for every other car you pass. Add to that a useless, almost
random collision detection, and you have a recipe for disaster. I often ran
straight through cars, as if they were desert mirages, but would just as often
crash against thin air, causing my car to flip over. Not that it mattered
much, as the game allowed me to beat it in spite of several severe accidents.
I was "lucky" to play the game on my Amiga 500 Mini, which emulates the game
at a higher processor speed. It also emulates the game as if it was installed on a hard
drive, minimizing the infamous mid-race loading times(!). Not that the
increased processor performance helped much. If anything, it only made the
game harder, as the traffic ahead of me jerked back and forth at a higher pace.
That's essentially all you need to know. Out Run for the Amiga is an awful
piece of work; an odd combination of impossible-to-play and easy-to-win, that
couldn't even get the basic priorities straight. The "a"-route I beat in three
or four tries, the "e" took me perhaps ten more, and then I got to the finishing line of "c" in the very next race. Then I decided I'd had enough.
It hardly felt like an interactive experience. At one point I ran straight
through some rocks on the side of the road at full speed, and nothing happened. A moment
later, I crashed against a car, coming to a complete stop. As I sped up, I
grazed another rock and my car flipped over at the speed of 30 km/h (that's
around 18 mph). In driving school, my instructor told me that's the max speed
you can run into people with minimal risk of causing major injuries.
I could go on about Out Run on the Amiga, but you already know more than you
should about Out Run on the Amiga. Just stay away from Out Run on the Amiga.
I'd recommend the arcade original (just compare the sense of speed between that one and Out Run on the Amiga). SEGA:s own conversion for the Master System looks pretty
sweet, too. The Mega Drive/Genesis one looks close to arcade perfection. Heck,
even the DOS-port seems better than Out Run on the Amiga.
[All screenshots are taken from www.mobygames.com]
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